Are we failing or learning?

Wow, 2018 was an eventful year. On the last day of the year I saw the news from OceanCleanup, a great project that first had to fight huge resistance and is now experiencing a setback. But actually this article is about Bitcoin and Blockchain. By the end of 2017, Bitcoin and many other crypto currencies had reached heights that made many dream (and some are converting all their belongings into cash (1) to invest in Bitcoin and benefit from the hype). You could also say: greed had gripped people and in 2018 the situation returned to normal. But what comes next?

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Cramping your style …

Mind the gap when entering your car

Italy, the land of lemons, bitter orange and automobilisti. Well, I confess I don’t know the names of the different Italian lemon varieties, but Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Lamborghini and Ferrari have been engraved in my memory since the 60s – trained in countless breaks in the school playground, with the then absolutely hip car version of “Happy Families”. “12 cylinder Ferrari” would have been the certain game winner, if only the number of seats hadn’t been the deciding factor.

However, hardly anyone had then seen one of these sports cars in real life anyway. Even the anointed ones who drove to the Adriatic with their parents in the VW Beetle (at the back) during the “big holidays”, hardly ever saw a Ferrari, Lamborghini etc. on Italian roads. How could they? Italian roads were even narrower than German country roads and full of racing bikes, three-wheeled vans and Fiat 500s. Italian sports cars were the dream of my youth – perhaps a fiction, but technologically leading edge. What is Italy like automobilistically today?

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The fairy tale of predictability

Once upon a time there was a great king who had ruled his country for many years. He also had a beautiful daughter, who grew up with frogs and dwarves, but that is completely irrelevant to this story.

The king had learned to protect his kingdom successfully against invaders and raids and had fought many a battle. He had a big, strong army, so nobody dared to attack; there was peace in his country for a long time. 

But more and more travellers reported incredible changes in other parts of the world.  Previously unknown kingdoms rose rapidly, while others disappeared into insignificance at the same speed.

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“First they ignore you, then…”

Do you know what happens next? This: “…they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win.”(1) A sentence often quoted by politicians, the weight of which is increased by the reference to Gandhi and with which you can always make an impression. Thus the populist politician Frauke Petry felt inclined to twitter this quote on 24.09.2017 to the result of the Bundestag election. Hmm…. But actually people say it didn’t come from Gandhi himself but from the US-American trade unionist Nicholas Klein a good 100 years ago.

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You can stay the way you are! – ?

The trainer has organized a transfer exercise in the seminar so that the participating manager can translate what he or she has heard and said to his or her working environment. Unfortunately, this transfer does not always work to everyone’s satisfaction. The manager takes it upon himself to change special points in his own behaviour, to organise himself more efficiently or to introduce new methods. But this often does not work as ideally conceived in the seminar. Then the environment was often “to blame”, which hindered  the application of new approaches. But that is only half the story.

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Riding a dead horse

According to Wikipedia, Industry 4.0 or the Fourth Industrial Revolution is “a word creation originating from a project in the high-tech strategy of the German government, which promotes the computerisation of manufacturing.” Is this now the panacea for all the problems of the manufacturing industry? Is it enough to network a factory?

An industrial revolution is characterised by the fact that it brings about fundamental changes in all areas of social life and thereby changes and reorganises the economy. But a few more sensors, some big data here and a pinch of cloud services there are not enough. It’s about more than integrating planning, production and resources. Many companies have to ask themselves whether their business model will still function at all in the future in the environment of new technical developments and social changes.

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Beschuitjes met muisjes

New frontier experiences on my gastronomic journey through the Netherlands

When a baby is born, this happy event is of course duly celebrated, and in Germany there are numerous possibilities for this. In my homeland, the Ruhr area, where things tend traditionally to be rather robust, fathers often buy a round in the pub and let “the baby pee”. I’ve also heard of the grandmothers’ huge cake creations, but I don’t know of any nationwide tradition of celebrating the arrival of a baby across state borders.

In the Netherlands it’s different: in the whole country when the baby is born, there is almost the same culinary variant to which people are invited -beschuitjes with muisjes. “What’s that?” – you will ask yourself.

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